Hyrule Historia Reveals The Zelda Timeline

Whilst The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma has always maintained that the official Legend Of Zelda timeline would remain confidential, the forthcoming Hyrule Historia will give us the first official look at the Legend of Zelda timeline. Here’s the contents:

History of Hyrule: Finally Revealed, The Genealogy of the Legend

The Timeline of Hyrule, Kingdom of the Gods: 68
The Legend of Gods and the Hero of Time: 70
The Downfall of Hyrule and the Last Hero: 92
The Twilight Realm and the Hero’s Descendant: 110
The Hero of Wind and the New World: 122

Unless Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma or Iwata say that this is the official timeline, I still won’t believe it. Also, this is only available in Japan at the moment. Still, I bet fans will find things that don’t match up and complain.

This. All the time authors go saying things like: “Remember what that compilation said? That’s not true. Didn’t happen” or “Remember the ‘official’ guide? Not accurate” and official books and adaptations became non-canon every once in a while, so until we get explicit confirmation from Eiji Aonuma that that’s the official, canon, definitive Zelda timeline, I won’t eat it, even if it turned out to follow my own personal theories about the timeline.

Anyways, considering how fans -and fanboys- work, I bet the text will be translated to English in a matter of days, if not hours, after the book is released.

In an interview w/ Nintendo Dream published in December 2006, Aonuma said the following when discussing Wind Waker: “Ocarina of Time basically has two endings of sorts; one has Link as a child and the other has him as an adult. This game, The Wind Waker, takes place a hundred years after the adult Link defeats Ganon at the end of Ocarina.”

In another interview in 07, he explicitly called Wind Waker “parallel.”

If you manage to make a working slinear timeline, Air, more power to you. This is why I hope whatever the timeline officially ends up reflecting the legend aspect by not being too concrete. Room for interpretation would be the best thing for it, in my opinion.

So the “Master Document” Aonuma.-san talked about years ago is real? I always had the feeling it was just an excuse he said to keep the falms calmed. I can’t believe something based on that document will be finally published.

Those headlines give the appearance that the timeline is just SS–>OoT–Split timeline; time 1: TP; timeline 2:TWWW–>PH–>ST and that’s all (which we already knew), ignoring (and thus leaving out of the canon) the oracle and all the pre-OoT games, which would be kind of sad.

Although I’ll take this with a grain of salt: we still don’t know if the contents of this book will truly follow what Aonuma-san has established for the timeline, and thus, until he says anything, I won’t take the book as canon. It’s not narrowminding from my part, but rather skepticism and a bit of genre savyness, because you know, all the time authors go saying things like: “Remember what that compilation said? That’s not true. Didn’t happen” or “Remember the ‘official’ guide? Not accurate”, so until we get explicit confirmation from Eiji Aonuma that that’s the official, canon, definitive Zelda timeline, I won’t eat it, even if it turned out to follow my own personal theories about the timeline.

Excuse me? I NEVER debated over MM’s place in the timeline. I just forgot to mention it, but you should have gotten the idea (I said “what we already knew”, which obviously includes MM coming after OoT in the child timeline -that is, between OoT and TP-).

If anything, I questioned the games that dpn’t have an already established place (OoX, TMC/FS/FSA and the pre-OoT games).

To be honest I don’t even know why am I replying to a trollish comment, but whatever.

Because even Nintendo (or every other publisher) can flip it. Remember when a Game Freak employee who actually had involvement in tehd esign of Pokemon BW (and thus, supposedly Word of God) said that there won’t be a third version to Pokémon BW then Masuda-san denied such statement? The same thing could happen again, so unless we get explicit confirmation by Aonuma, this isn’t the last word yet.

That was different. The employee said that Gen 5 wouldn’t be “as long” as previous Gens (which have started maxing out around 4 years per gen), and fansites took it as “OMG, THERE’S GOING TO BE NO GREY!”

Then when Matsuda came out and clarified that they never said there wouldn’t be a third version, people took it that the two statements were contradictory.

No. She ACTUALLY said that tehre won’t be anymore entries in the BW series. i know it because I read the actual interview. You might have read a translation or a summary since it was originally published in Spanish and then translated to English and spread over the world, but Spanish being my natural language, I read the actual interview, when she said “No habrá más entregas en esta generación” (lit. “there’ll be no more entries during this generation”). So it wasn’t the fansites missunderstandig things, she did say there would be no Gray, which proves my original post: even the publishers might give incorrect information, thus the book coming from Nintendo doesn’t guarantee 100% that this is canon.
Unless, of course, the text is signed (or at least endorsed) by Aonuma san or something like that.

Oh, give me a fucking break. Yes, she said that, but her statement was refuted by other Game Freak members just a few days later. This book isn’t just a random statement made by a clueless member of the team. Cut it out with the stupid strawman arguments and admit you’re wrong.

So does this confirm that TP Link is a direct descendant of OoT Link? Interesting. This also gives more credibility to the “Hero’s shade being OoT Link” Theory, with the references to the bloodline and everything. SS said that the Hero would be reincarnated, but if he was a direct descendant, that’s so much cooler!

Well if you look closely, there is one chapter between the OoT and TP chapters: “The Downfall of Hyrule and the Last Hero”, which implies that after the Hero of Time, there’s another one ‘last’ hero (perhaps the one that helped imprison Ganon in the Twilight Realm”), who took action after the events of OoT but before TP, the wording here impliying that TP’s Link is the descendant of this ‘last’ hero rather than the Hero of Time. Although I, like you, have always thought that OoT’s Link is the Hero’s Shade (and TP’s Link’s ancestor), however this ‘last hero’ chapter seems to deny this.

Yeah but I think he’s right: this timeline seems to ignore everything that is not OoT and its sequels (WW, PH, ST, MM and TP), leaving all the pre-OoT games, as well as the handheld games and the Four Sword games, out of the timeline. And since these are the games which we don’t know where they fit (the others already confirmed by Aonuma) and debate over, then this timeline, if canon, solves nothing.

^This. This makes most sense. The 5 main chapters (SS, OoT, MM, WW, TP) ,and all of the ‘sub-chapters’ (every other game). Plus I believe Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, Oricle of Ages/Seasons were 4 non-cannon games. Link’s Awakening can be shoved in anywhere since it was a dream/nightmare.